You can't judge an external drive without separating the mechanism from the enclosure/chip.

This is a very good point. While I won't touch WD enclosures, I use WD internal drives all over the place without a problem. And I'm sure LaCie uses whatever internal drives they can get at the moment, which are probably the same varied brands of bare drives a lot of us are happy with when used on their own or in a different enclosure. The problem with WD and LaCie are the flakiness of the enclosures themselves: the build quality, the power supplies, the cooling design.